FRIEZE MASTERS: Stand A08, Regent's Park, London

Yokosuka Story (1977), by the Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, comprises forty vintage black and white prints which are typically displayed in a large grid. As the title suggests, the work depicts the town of Yokosuka, a small port in Japan where Ishiuchi grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, when the town was the site of a large American naval base.

In these years of military occupation the town was infiltrated by American culture and in turn the visual landscape reflected this struggle between local and foreign, past and present and the uncertainty of Japan’s future identity.

Like other slightly older Japanese photographers associated with the ‘Provoke’ movement, such as Shōmei Tōmatsu and Daido Moriyama, with whom she worked, Ishiuchi was part of the post-war generation who used their cameras to record and explore what it meant to be Japanese at this pivotal moment in history. The Provoke movement experimented with photographic techniques in order to offer a more subjective and radical vision of society in Japan post-Hiroshima, focusing on the alienation and disaffection characterising urban life.

The series Yokosuka Again, places Ishiuchi’s camera at the epicenter, or root cause, of her childhood anxieties. She enters Honchō, a neighborhood popular with American soldiers and sex workers to this day, and documents the bars and clubs previously forbidden to her as a child. The images mark her willingness to face the trauma of her past as well as the US military base that keeps the city of Yokosuka frozen in time. Interior shots of the Enlisted Men’s Club, a run-down hangout of soldiers demolished in 1990, as well as the dark silhouette of a US naval ship in “Yokosuka Again #43”  appear as specters of the city’s wartime past and militarized present.

"Kawada was one of the most influential Japanese photographers of the 1960s, and is maybe best known for his seminal book Chizu (The Map), which was designed as a printed requiem for the dead of Hiroshima. Published in 1965, twenty years after an atomic bomb destroyed the city, it has rightly become one of the most important and sought after photography books ever produced. It was republished in 2005 by Nazraeli Press. This portrait, included in another of Kawada's books, Sacre Atavism (1971), was taken in Hamburg, Germany. It has a visceral quality that I look for in a street portrait. What makes it even more exceptional is that it is not posed. His acute eye, timing and printing style has kept Kawada at the forefront of Japanese photography, even though he no longer practises." 

"My first published photo book, The Map, took me five years to complete, beginning in 1960. In late 1961 a solo show with work from the series was held at Fuji Photo Salon in Tokyo, organised in three parts.

The first featured a ruined castle that was blown up intentionally by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The second comprised photographs taken a decade after the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima. They showed the stains and flaking ceilings of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure left standing at the heart of the detonation zone.

The third part concerned Tokyo during the period of economic recovery: images of advertising, scrap iron, the trampled national flag and emblems of the American Forces such as Lucky Strike and Coca-Cola, all twisted together, their order shuffled again and again. Some appeared as a montage to be presented as a metaphor. I dare not say the meaning of it."

Kikuji Kawada in conversation with Mariko Finch for the exhibition with Tate Modern; Conflict, Time, Photography, 2014.